White Whiskey From Nashua's Djinn Spirits

A new distillery offers something a little different

By Susan Laughlin

White whiskey is basically moonshine — a whiskey that is produced with little or no aging in traditional charred whiskey barrels. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any flavor. Husband and wife Andy and Cindy Harthcock started Djinn (pronounced Gin) Spirits in Nashua a few months ago using their own techniques to produce smooth and flavorful spirits.

The whiskey starts with malts and yeast that are fermented into a beer wort. The wort is transferred to a huge still kettle that Andy built using his engineering background. As the mix heats, the alcohol vapors rise through a 20-foot chimney and slowly condense back down the tube where the "head" (mostly lethal methyl alcohol) and the "heart" (the quality ethyl alcohol) and the "tails" (undesirable ethyl alcohol) are separated. Andy ages some of the heart production in 20-liter oak barrels and the rest goes straight into bottles for the Beat 3 White Whiskey. Without significant aging, the whiskey picks up flavor from the malt and yeasts that create congeners — byproducts of fermentation that are responsible for most of the taste and aroma of distilled beverages. From malt to bottling, the ratio is about 18 gallons of product from 450 gallons in the malt kettle.

For now, the only place their products can be purchased is the tasting room at the distillery in Nashua. Also available is a small barrel that can be filled with three bottles of Beat 3 and aged for about three weeks at home to produce a more deeply colored and flavorful whiskey. Also available are a gin, aged whiskey and soon a clove-flavored Lithuanian liqueur called Krupnik.